One of the challenges that continues to face designers of devices having user-engageable displays, such as touch displays, pertains to providing enhanced functionality for users, through gestures that can be employed with the devices. This is so, not only with devices having larger or multiple screens, but also in the context of devices having a smaller footprint, such as tablet PCs, hand-held devices, smaller multi-screen devices and the like.
One challenge with gesture-based input is that of providing secondary actions. For example, in touch interfaces today, it is common to tap on an item to launch the item. This makes it difficult to provide secondary functionality such as an ability to select items. Further, certain challenges exist with so-call pannable surfaces, i.e. surfaces that can be panned and have their content moved. For example, a pannable surface typically reacts to a finger drag and moves the content in the direction of the user's finger. If the surface contains objects that a user might want to re-arrange, it is difficult to differentiate when the user wants to pan the surface or re-arrange the content.